Under Budapest (3 page)

“Laci.”

I look over to the door. Two guys. They look pissed and they're big. Bigger than me, even, and I'm pretty big. Fuck. Laci didn't tell me their names.

“Dude,” I say. Guy Number One doesn't do the fist bump. Number Two neither.

“You fucked over the wrong guy, Laci Bekes.”

Fuck me. “I meant no disrespect. I just lost it. I lost the letter.”

“You think we care?”

Guy's pushing his chest into my face.

“What I'm saying is, I just can't find it at this moment. But I will. I'm a businessman.”

“Janos, you backstabbing shithead sonuvabitch twat.” Punch to the side of the head, not fake this time, and I'm laid out flat, sprawling. Csaba. What the
fuck
. Guys are looking down at me. I get up.

Guy Number Two turns on Csaba. “You called him Janos? This isn't Laci Bekes?”

“Laci Bekes?” Csaba laughs. Csaba, man, you gotta work on that laugh. That stupid sonuvabitch laugh.

You know that smile, that smile that says, “Not funny. Not fucking funny, you hulyes fucking idiot.” That's what both dudes are giving me.

“Thanks, little man,” says Guy Number Two. He takes Csaba by the arm, shows him the door. Csaba gives me one last look, and there he goes. Now it's just me. And I'm not feeling so good.

“Okay, you know what? Time's up, Laci or Janos or whoever you are. You're an artificer and I don't care for artificers.”

Artificer? I don't even know what that means. Neither does the other dude, I figure, by the look on his face.

“Yeah, well, it's complicated. Laci asked me—”

Other guy opens his jacket. FUCKI'MGONNADIE. Do I put my hands up? Oh, they're already up. Weird. Holy fuck, I've never even seen a gun like that—not in real life. I'm just some guy. I don't even really live here. Is anybody seeing this?

“Okay, dudes? I'm
not
Laci. Serious. Whatever he's into, it's got nothing to do with me.”

“Put your hands down.”

Right. Chicks at the bar over there turn their back on me. Bartender's leaning into them. Room full of cool people and no one sees what's going on.

“Walk ahead of me. Everything's normal. Nobody's looking at you.”

Right. Walking. Nobody looking. Down a flight of stairs and into what used to be a courtyard. Still kinda is, except it's grooving, and maybe people see me and maybe they don't. Everybody just hanging out, looking hot, and no one knows who I am. My dad is gonna
shit
. I can hear him now: “How do you get in these
situations
, Janos?”

Past the bouncer. What does this dude care? If I were
really
Laci, he'd care. Fucking right, he would. But I'm just me. Janos Hagy. Entrepreneur. Nobody.

Dude. Mercedes-fucking-Benz, dude. Are you shitting me?

“Get in.”

“My friends, I'm not Laci. I don't know what Laci did, but I swear to God, I got nothing to do with it. I'm Janos Hagy. I don't know who you are. I promise I won't report you. Please let me go. I'm only here for my gap year. Next year I gotta go to college. I swear, I won't—”

“Shut the fuck up.” Guy slams my head into the car roof. “Get in.”

Fuck. I'm in, dude. I'm shutting up. Not a word. No. I'm gonna be fine. I'm Janos fucking Hagy, man of opportunity. You'll see. You'll see what I am.

Whoa.

You never know how quiet inside a car can be till you're in a Benz going over a bridge in Budapest in the middle of the night with two guys not talking and one serious fucking gun.

What We Deserve

Tibor Roland unbuttons his blue shirt and hangs it on the hook. He eases off his stiff Campers and his cotton socks and places them inside the locker, socks stuffed into shoes. He drops his khakis and his Joe Boxers and hangs them on the other hook. For a moment, he stands in the deserted change room entirely naked. He breathes deeply of the humid, chlorinated air and he feels the spongy padding beneath his feet, the draft on his legs, the slight chill emanating from the metal lockers. At thirty-five, he knows he's in reasonably good shape. Though not what anyone would call “cut,” he enjoys, in a simple way, the solidity of his thighs, the straightness of his spine, his lightly haired chest. In this naked interval, free of rumpled clothes, he is a living, breathing entity made up of hundreds of thousands of sensations, and he can feel every single one of them. Then he pulls on his trunks, knots the string at the waist, snaps a bathing cap on his head, slips feet into flip-flops, locks his locker, and flip-flops out to the pool.

The hotel has a decent pool, he's pleased to see —not Olympic but at least ten metres long. No waterslides or multi­coloured pool noodles. Windows the length of one wall look out over Montreal. Exactly right, except. Except someone has beaten him here. He pauses, towel in hand, and feels his moment decay just a little.

Never mind, he tells himself as he places towel over plastic lounger, licks his goggles for suction, snugs them over his eyes, and steps out of his flip-flops. This is still good. In violation of the sign-posted rule, he dives in.

They pass each other as they do their laps, the woman at a steady breaststroke and Tibor front-crawling. At least she understands the concept of lengths, doesn't paddle around in circles like some hotel swimmers, their chins beatifically raised. The swimmers ignore each other as they pass. He could almost forget he isn't alone. After about twenty minutes, he stops at the end of the pool to catch his breath. The woman is still breaststroking, which she does with ease, dipping her head under and knifing forward. She pauses at the other end to catch her breath, fastening her gaze on the clock. Maybe she's timing her breaks. She wears a red one-piece and a bathing cap. Tibor Roland, from his end, his elbows on the edge of the pool, sees how she frowns at the clock and how her chest moves with her breathing. In and out.

Then she starts again.

Tibor, too, starts into his third set. When he makes his turn, the woman has stopped swimming and is sitting on the ledge at the opposite end of the pool, massaging her foot. When he reaches her end, he stops. It's a narrow pool. They are close.

The most obvious thing about her face, from this angle at least, is her chin and the set of her mouth. She has a strong chin, a single shallow dimple at its centre, and she bites her lower lip hard, as if biting down a pain. And it is maybe this combination, of the strong chin and the serious frown when she looks at the clock, together with the bitten lip that makes Tibor want to talk to her even though, for all he knows, she speaks no English.

He does another lap and then emerges beside her. “Cramp?”

She half laughs, more like a sniff, embarrassed. “I always get them.” American, he guesses. Probably also here for the conference. Academics occupy the entire hotel—geo­graphers, historians, political scientists, legal theorists all here in Montreal, Quebec, to discuss the meaning and future of post-Soviet Central Europe.

“You have to walk it off.”

Holding her foot more tightly, she nods. “I'm sure it'll go away in a minute.”

And Tibor, in a moment of what he would later consider remarkable insight, realizes that she is likely reluctant to struggle clumsily to an undignified stand and hobble away.

“Let me get your towel.”

“Oh. Thanks.” And she points to where it lies folded on one of the plastic lounge chairs.

He drapes the towel over her shoulders. “Can I give you a hand up or would you like to sit for a bit?”

“I'll just sit it out, I think.”

“All right then. Well. I'm done for the day.” Tibor grabs his own towel and flip-flops back to the change room.

Warming in the sauna, he congratulates himself for being both perceptive and generous. He could have swum for another half-hour at least but instead had done the gracious thing, leaving the woman to deal with her affliction without spectators. He hopes she'd recognized how perceptive he'd been. He hopes he'll see her again before the conference ends.

They nod when they see each other in the pool again the next morning. And then that afternoon she attends his paper on the twenty-first-century reverberations of early twentieth-century Hungarian nationalism, and she stays to ask him a question after the talk. Her stiffly collared shirt makes him long for the red one-piece, but he is undistracted by the freckled cleavage the shirt coyly hides as he explains the Hungarian emotional attachment to territories long-since lost.

There's not much mystery to Tibor Roland. He knows this. He would like to be more intriguing. He'd like to have more layers, but he doesn't. Mostly, he's made his peace with this because, he figures, it's what made him a historian. History gives him mysteries to solve, stories to tell. He'd chosen to specialize in Hungarian history both because this was his mother's birthplace and because she refused to talk about it. So maybe his mother has layers that he doesn't. In any case, Rafaela, clearly, is interested. On the last evening of the conference, over glasses of cheap Australian Shiraz, as limp, savoury pastries circulate in a newly carpeted room without chairs, they talk. The plastic square that dangles from her neck identifies her as an “independent scholar.” That is, unemployed. She'd completed a Ph.D. in regional studies, specializing in Russia, at Harvard six years ago, but she is based in Toronto now. She moved there with her husband when he got a job at Queen's Park. No, not a politician but a policy analyst.

There are not too many women named Rafaela, certainly not more than one married to a provincial policy analyst. It is a coincidence, but there it is. Daniel had never introduced Tibor Roland to his wife.

“Daniel loves it,” she continues. “I can't imagine anything more boring. Provincial politics—it's all health care and education, wait times and dropout rates. Makes me want to stick a fork in my eye.” Rafaela grins. “Which I've never done, by the way. I'm really a paragon of self-restraint.” She lifts her wineglass to her lips and sips, somehow without shifting her laughing gaze from his.

Is she flirting with him? Has she mentioned her husband to make the boundaries clear? He expects her to say next: “I think you know my husband. Didn't you go to school together?” But she doesn't. And her tone is a ball tossed ever so gently. It says, How flimsy—no, how arbitrary and scalable—a boundary is a husband.

“Self-restraint's all right if it saves your eye, I suppose, but I'd hate to think you'd adopted it as a defining virtue.”

“Really? I thought you Canadians were all about self-restraint. I've been trying to master it ever since I moved here, but I don't think I've got it yet. I can tell by the way people stiffen.” She bares her teeth in aghast-Torontonian rictus. “Sort of the way you looked when you first saw me in the pool that day.”

Tibor feels himself blush. “I like to have the pool to myself.” He shrugs.

Mouth twitches. “Ah, Tibor. It's hard to share, isn't it?”

Rafaela's breasts are perfectly pendant, barely supported, and they stretch the cotton dress she wears. Tibor thinks he would like to hold them, one in each hand, as he penetrates her from behind.

“I wanted to ask you yesterday,” she says, “about why Hungary seems to have become more nationalist, with more fascist leanings, than, say, Poland or the Czech Republic.”

They regain the ground of ordinary academic conversation, now pleasurably heightened by their confidence in their own attractiveness, the increasing likelihood of sex, their distance from her husband, Daniel, who has apparently never told his wife about his old friend, Tibor Roland. Tibor decides he's hurt by this omission. Around them, the poorly ventilated room fills with the brittle polite laughter of academic networking. They go to the bar for more wine. Later, they sit together at dinner and when she turns to talk with the man to her right, Tibor feels abandoned and ridiculous. When she turns back, he is confident and witty again.

She has chocolate cake for dessert. He has pecan pie. They both have coffee. The less lucky drift away from the tables and back to their solitary rooms, leaving white napkins and crumbs of pastry.

“I'd like to see you again,” he says.

Tibor bites the inside of his upper lip but keeps his eyes on her face. He's chosen the phrase carefully, not to offend, leaving it open for her to decide. Her reaction seems inordinately delayed, and for a moment he wonders if he's misjudged, if she takes her marriage seriously and their conversation had been empty flirtation, not invitation. She is parsing the question, considering. God. She is going to tell him to fuck off. And then she's going to go home and tell her husband that his old buddy, Tibor Roland, hit on her. But then, reprieve. Vibrant pink begonias blooming from her cleavage, all the way to her forehead.

“In my room?” she says finally. Daniel's wife says, all red.

. . .

“I'm making eggs. You want eggs?”

“What kind of eggs?”

“Scrambled?”

“Scrambled is good.”

Daniel had his own place, a room in a shared house just off College Street. Tibor often slept on the couch on Thursday night after pub, unable or unwilling to return to his cheaper but much less exciting room north of Dupont. No one lived north of Dupont, but Tibor had found a basement in a house owned by lesbian filmmakers who grew vegetables in their front yard and charged him almost nothing in rent in return for his walking their dog and shovelling their walk in the winter.

This morning he remembers was fourteen years ago.

Tibor wandered into the kitchen in his bare feet, rubbing his eyes. “Tea?” he asked.

“Sure.”

Daniel whipped eggs as Tibor filled the kettle, his face stretched in its rounded chrome surface flecked with brown and orange spatters where grease had dried. There were four years of spattered grease on this kettle, and Tibor remembered when it was new and he'd only just met Daniel and he'd come to Daniel's apartment to cram for the Russian midterm and Daniel had made tea, boiling the water in his brand-new, just-moved-out-of-home kettle. This kettle had seen four years of their friendship. Four years of Thursday nights and Friday mornings just like this one. Four years of sharing the pains and victories of academic life.